Fog Lifted Read online

  Fog Lifted

  William Tyler Davis

  Copyright © 2017 by William Tyler Davis

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the author, except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.

  williamtylerdavis.com

  To Addie Zane, there’s no greater love than a father’s.

  Contents

  Introduction

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Hero in a Halfling Preview

  Map

  Prologue

  There and Never Coming Back Again

  Big and Little Women

  The Men in the High Castle

  A Shadow in the Dark

  Afterword

  Acknowledgments

  Introduction

  Ever since reading Fahrenheit 451 in high school, Ray Bradbury has been my go to author. My favorite. Ray wrote a lot of short stories in his life. And one of my favorites is called The Fog Horn. I named a city for it (others are also based on my favorite books). This story is loosely based on Ray’s short story as well as the legend of the Loch Ness Monster.

  It stars secondary characters of my Epik Fantasy series, in a hope to give readers more insight. Collus, and Rotrick, both Rangers. The dwarves: Two-finger, Wellspoken, and Billy.

  This is a short story, only around 12k words. You don’t have to have read Hero in a Halfling to draw anything from it. Though, these characters play their part in that story as well.

  - Billy T

  1

  A hundred and fifty days, he thought. So many of them spent leading the Company here blindly, none of them knowing his true intention. And really, this trip was years in the making. Collus had first heard tell of the beast when he was a young man. But unlike most legends, it never grew. The trail acted on its own accord, not drawing attention to itself. Echoes died away. Men who thought they knew, later recanted.

  But Collus continued his pursuit, hearing whispers meant for other men’s ears. He went down paths that other men would not follow.

  He let out a breath.

  Icy tendrils of vapor swirled away like smoke.

  Without the fog, Seascape would look like any other village. The fog was what set it apart. Here it was noon, and it still hung low to the ground. Breathing felt too much like drinking.

  As a Ranger, Coe had seen all sorts of land, everything the realm had to offer. And he knew that when things had names like Foghorn, those names were well intentioned—explanatory.

  Seascape lay ten miles from its kingdom. But this was where the kingdom of Foghorn had taken its name, on this bay. On this cliff. The village clung to the rock above the sea. It sat on the furthest western edge of the continent, hundreds of miles from Dune All-En, Collus’ home.

  He waved a hand through the fog. And like magic, it parted and then formed again, a porous wall of wet nothing.

  It looked like something out of a storybook fantasy.

  The Ranger scuffed his boots along the ground, waiting.

  He knew exactly how many days it had been. It was always day one hundred and fifty when he remembered to remember his wife. Coe’s children never left his mind. The boys' faces lit up his daydreams—the only time he dreamed. Their laughs and giggles echoed like a choir of angels, usually at times when things like that were a distraction.

  It was his wife, at home with them, doing the hard work of raising children, that he tended to forget.

  And not for the usual reasons either; she wasn’t ugly or fat. It was just that she was mean as a dragon. One who’d lost its golden pillow. And Coe knew all about things like that—the Ranger was often the one hired to kill such things.

  How a thief could steal gold from under a sleeping dragon’s head, without bothering to slit the damn thing’s throat, was beyond him.

  “What’s botherin’ you?” Two-finger asked him.

  The dwarf fingered the loops on his belt with, well, three fingers. A double bladed axe ran from the tip of the dwarf’s ass and settled securely between his shoulder blades. He twisted around to face the Ranger.

  “Aye,” Wellspoken said, “it does look like something’s wrong with your face.”

  Billy, another of his dwarf companions, scrutinized him. “Aye, it’s all scrunched up like this.” His face made no change, maintaining the puckered and knotted expression it had the previous minute. The typical look of most dwarves.

  “My face definitely doesn’t look like that,” Coe said.

  “Well I knows you ain’ts got this nice a beard,” Billy said.

  The dwarf’s beard was as white as snow. It was scraggly; a tuft of patchy yellowed hair grew longer at his chin. It bristled as the dwarf smiled cheerily.

  “Aye, no one’s got as good as that,” Wellspoken said, laughing.

  The dwarf’s black beard was braided and tucked into his belt. He wore a faded iron breast plate and the traditional iron helmet. Of the three, Wellspoken was the best looking, and, of course, also the most well-spoken.

  They stood at the edge of the town where the houses were built into the rock. Some with slanted roofs and some with slanted walls, all led up the slope to the main drag of the city where buildings on the flat ground grew taller and wider.

  Coe's boots crunched against the sand and seashell path. A curved and jaded thing itself, barely distinguishable from the ground, the path cut through the heart of town where it stopped as the cliff dropped to the sea. There, three towers stood over the city, and the road morphed to make narrow stone steps down to a harbor below. The towers were as tall as the cliff itself. Coe had heard of a lighthouse, but why three? Through the fog, he made out each light, dull and barely able to pierce the thick fog: one yellow, one red, and the middle, blue.

  Three boys made their way toward them but ducked off into the woods before meeting the Company on the road. Collus watched them high step through the brush, but then he lost them. Weirdly, there was no laughter, just the sound of the trees as they swayed in the wind.

  A man came trotting down the path from the village, Rotrick, Collus’s oldest friend. He wore the traditional garb of a Ranger. A black jerkin hung over a green linen shirt. His boots were only calf length, meant for both riding or walking. A black wide-brimmed hat shadowed his eyes, which Collus knew to be light blue, like all Rangers.

  “Seems they’re up in the pub having lunch,” Rotrick said. “That or out at sea.”

  “The whole town?” Wellspoken asked.

  “Most of ‘em.”

  Collus nodded.

  They hiked the rest of the path and headed for the bar. In a village this small, there was only the one. And like usual, it was the geographic and socioeconomic center of the town.

  “Prolly best if you let me do the talking,” Collus said before turning the knob on the door.

  There were a fair few number of people eating at the pub. Four pillars of light filtered through four windows, even hazier than the misty light outside. Pipe smoke and fire smoke hung like a cloud close to the pub’s ceiling. A fire burned in a man-sized fireplace at the end of the room.

  The townsfolk looked up at them like a scratched record.

  “I’m looking for the mayor,” Collus said.

  More quizzical looks.

  “The constable?”

  The man at the bar shrugged. He seemed the be the only one willing to pay the Company any mind.

  “I’m looking for who runs things in this town,” Collus said sni
dely.

  “Oh, um,” the barman looked around, “I guess that’d be me.”

  A few men kept their gaze on Collus, Rotrick, and the three dwarves, but the others went back to eating lunch.

  Collus stepped over to the bar.

  “I heard some tell that there have been disturbances here in your village.”

  “Disturbances?” the barman said, confused.

  “Problems.”

  “Problems?” the barman said. He took a glass from the bar absent-mindedly and began to fill it from the tap. “Can’t say I get your meaning.”

  “You know,” Collus urged, “goats getting eaten in the middle of the night, people disappearing. Things like that.”

  “Oh, right you are,” said the barman. “But we’s the only people eating the goats round here.” He handed Collus the mug. “A fair number of folks disappear though, mind. How many folks you say disappear, Marty?”

  “‘Bout one a month,” said the man at the edge of the bar. He was old. About as old as they come. He looked like a stump in the middle of a lake, withered and aged by time and weather. He had the dark complexion of both Collus and Rotrick. The sun had kissed their ancestors in a different way than most other men of the realm, leaving them as dark as ash.

  Collus had always found it made things easier. He could blend in with the forest in the day. And with almost anything at night.

  “Right,” Collus said. “That’s what I was talking about. You’ve had problems. See, I’m a Ranger, and me and my crew here, we investigate disturbances like that. We get down to the root cause. And usually, we kill them or drive them away. Things like that.”

  “Well, we all knows the root cause,” the barman said nonchalantly. He handed an ale down to Rotrick then began to fill another.

  “You do?”

  “Yep,” Marty at the edge of the bar said, nodding. “Ole Necie.”

  “You named it?”

  “O’ course,” the barman said. “See we wanted to call her Nessie, but then we heard a town’s already calling their monster that.”

  “Shame,” said Marty somberly.

  “And you’re okay with losing a person a month?” Collus asked.

  “Well, no,” the barman said, shrugging. “But they’ve got it coming to ‘em, don’t they? Being out on the water and all. She hardly ever comes on land.”

  “And what exactly do you do in this town?” Rotrick asked, looking around, unable to hold his tongue any longer. “What’s your primary industry?”

  “Fishing,” Marty said confidently.

  “Yep. Fishing,” the barman said. “Well except me o’ course. I run the bar.”

  “And the town,” Marty said encouragingly.

  “Right, and that.”

  “So,” Collus paused, thinking. “You don’t require the services of a Ranger?”

  “Rangers,” Rotrick said.

  “See,” the barman said, “I thoughts Ranger-ing was supposed to be solo work.”

  “It was,” Rotrick agreed.

  “It usually is,” Collus said reluctantly.

  This was the part where the town was supposed to put together a collection then encourage the Ranger and his men to defend them. But the people at the bar had their heads down in their stew.

  Collus sighed.

  “Tell you what, maybe we could take a look for you,” he struggled to find the right words. “For, um, half our usual rate?”

  The dwarves coughed.

  Rotrick stepped on his toe. Hard.

  “Sorry, I meant to say, two-thirds our usual rate.”

  The pressure on his toe eased.

  “Two-thirds, you say?” The barman pursed his lips. He looked over to Marty, who shrugged. “I guess we could look into it. You’re saying the monster would be gone completely? I’m not in for that coming back once every sixty years business. I have grandkids, ya know.”

  “Completely,” Collus agreed. He looked around the bar. Heads bobbed up and the people were staring once again.

  “Is there a more private place we could talk?” Collus asked.

  There was.

  Rotrick and the dwarves sipped on pints as the barman took Collus to the back, past the kitchen that smelled of fish and bad decisions. The cook was busy prepping pies. He stood over one, mending the crust; sweat dribbled from his brow. By the look, it could have been named sweat apple pie. There were only about a dozen slices of apple in each.

  Behind the kitchen, a dusty and crowded office stole all manner of unused or broken items. The collection included a chair and a desk but also several mixing bowls, three tea kettles, a lamp, and a lute with its neck broken in half.

  The two men stepped inside. The barmen drew up a piece of parchment with half a scrawl of words already written on it.

  “So, this fee,” the barman said. “Where abouts does it come to?”

  He began writing.

  “Well, uh,” Collus said. “There’s the um, regular fee and we divide that into thirds and then double it.”

  He hesitated, thinking. “Then, of course, there’s the dwarves fee,” he said eagerly.

  “Uh huh,” the barmen nodded. “Dwarf fee. They’re like your helpers or something?” He continued writing. The print was small and illegible.

  “Yeah, helpers,” Collus said. He pawed at the back of his neck. This ruse seemed to be going well. “And then, of course, there’s the hidden fee.”

  “The hidden fee?”

  “Yes,” Collus said. “It’s for anything we find, that’s, um, hidden.”

  “Ah, I guess I can understand that. One time fee though, right? If you find two things that’s hidden you don’t go doubling the fee now, do ya?”

  “No,” Collus said. “It’s just the one.”

  “Right,” the barman said. He scribbled it down. “And o’ course, if you all die, this is null and void. Right?”

  He looked at Collus suspiciously. “We aren’t in the business of paying off widows and such.”

  “No,” Collus said. “You pay for services rendered.”

  “That sounds about right,” the barman said. “Funny you should come around the time we’s expecting her.”

  The barman signed his name at the bottom of the contract; he handed it to the Ranger.

  “Expecting her?” Collus said. He played dumb; he’d expected something like this.

  “Well, o’ course,” the barman said. “It’s better we know when she’ll be heading up this way. So we can send some fool out there, unknowing. Thinking she’ll be coming through tomorrow though. She usually likes the fog to be a bit more thick.”

  “It gets thicker?”

  The barman nodded.

  “Let’s see,” he said. “There’s you, and the others. That’ll probably buy us three, maybe even four months. If ya die, that is. Depends on the dwarves, I’m not sure she’ll count thems as proper eatin’.”

  Collus smiled through clenched teeth.

  “Just sign there,” the barman said, pointing. “And we’ll get you all squared up.”

  2

  The horizon wasn’t visible through the fog. But he knew it was out there somewhere. The gentle sound of water and waves crashing against the cliff was a reminder of the vastness of the sea.

  Now and then a gull called lazily.

  Climbing down the stone steps was more rigorous than any of them had imagined. Loose pebbles bounced casually down each stair, and twice, a dwarf lost his footing. Luckily, their low center of gravity kept them from falling too far.

  A few men, on their way up from the water, met the Company about halfway. They nodded, not saying a word, just breathing open mouthed and staring the Company down oddly. Coe watched as they returned to town.

  The docks were little more than planks of wood tied to barnacled pilings.

  “Believe that’s our boat there,” Collus said.

  It was little more than a dinghy. Enough to fit five bodies, three of them dwarves, and their gear.

  “Boat?”
Two-finger questioned. “Ya never said anything about a boat.”

  “What’d you expect? I said it was a sea creature, didn’t I?”

  “Yeah, but ya never said a boat.” Two-finger looked at the water reproachfully. “I can’t swim.”

  “Are you serious?” Collus barked. “Does anyone else have mission altering information they’d like to share?”

  “Uh, I don’t swim either,” said Billy, but the dwarf shrugged it off and was the first inside the dinghy.

  “I, um, can float on my back a good ways,” Wellspoken said.

  “And you?” Collus stared his friend down.

  “I only dog-paddle.”

  Coe sighed. “Well, this complicates things a little.”

  He threw his pack into the dinghy. The others did the same.

  “Does anything feel odd to you?” Rotrick asked. “I just got a chill like some folks up on the cliff might be watching us.”

  “Well, they probably are.” He decided to give the Company one last lie. “I bet it’s the first time a Ranger’s looked into this issue. They’re probably just interested.”

  “Aren’t Rangers from over this way?” Wellspoken asked. He stepped into the dinghy cautiously and it sunk on that side.

  “They are,” Collus said. Again, he pointed his face to the horizon, but this time his eyes searched the other boats. “Rangers are western men,” he said. “And it doesn’t get more western than Foghorn. But it’s been centuries since those days. And Rangers are nothing if not nomads.”

  “But you’ve been livin’ in Dune All-En fer years,” Two-finger said.

  He took his axe from his back and threw it down to the bottom of the boat.

  “That’s different. I spend more nights sleeping on the ground than I do at home.”